The earliest religion of which we have any knowledge was that prevailing in the Valley of the Nile over seven, and perhaps as long as ten, thousand years ago. The origin of these Egyptian Aborigines we do not know--some have supposed that they came from a mixture of conquering Lybians, with the early dwellers along the lower courses of the river. Time has effaced all record of any religious texts which they may have possessed, yet we can tell from the manner in which they buried their dead, when not dismembered, with their faces always to the south, and lying upon their left side, while the corpse was wrapped in the skins of gazelles or in grass mats--that their ideas of a future life were tolerably well-defined. The civilization of this people was modified by the arrival of the conquering immigrants who probably came from Asia, either by way of Arabia or across the Red Sea, and who, in turn, engrafted upon the religion of the conquered certain tenets of their own, and in this way formed a new system, the records of which we find in "The Book of the Dead," which is not only the oldest book extant, but also the most antiquated collection of sacred literature of which we have knowledge. Exploration in Egyptian burying-grounds plainly shows that between the time of the disposition of the dead, as first noted, and the date of the supremacy of the "Book of the Dead," that there existed civilizations in this valley who no longer buried their dead whole, with crude attempts at embalming with bitumen, but who burned their corpses more or less completely, and threw the remaining bones into a shallow pit. After this came a race who dismembered the bodies of their dead, burying the hands and feet in one place, while the trunk and the rest of the arms and legs were placed in a grave, separate again from the head. It is impossible, of course, to even guess at the length of time necessary to effect such changes in the customs of people, but we do know that at least seventy centuries ago the ritual contained in the "Book of the Dead" was generally accepted. And from this remote pre-dynastic time down to the seventh century after Christ, mummifying was, in some form or other, continually practiced in the Valley of the Nile. At the earliest time of which we have record, we find the Egyptians worshiping a number of autochthonic gods, of whom Osiris and his sister Isis were the chief. Their ideas of the deities were entirely anthropomorphic. Osiris having lived and suffered death and mutilation, and having been embalmed, was by his sisters, Isis and Nephthys, provided with a series of charms, by which he was protected from all evil and harm in the future life, and who had recited certain magical formulæ which had, in the world to come, given him everlasting life. It is certain that the practice of this belief changed in minor details many times as the semi-barbarous and sensual North Africans were subjected to the influence of their